The first thing you should have asked is: What kind of radiation from what type of source?
"While it had been treated to reduce radioactive caesium, tests of the leaked water found it was still highly contaminated with beta-ray emitting substances including strontium, which has a half-life of about 30 years and can cause bone cancers."
Uhhh isn't that the argument that EVERYBODY uses to stick their shit in startup and slow Windows to a crawl, that THEIR shit is important and lightweight
And they're all absolutely right.
Now more than ever, it IS important to keep BOTH applications and OS updated. You Windows promoters are all very quick to leap to their defence and claim it's Flash, Acrobat, Java, Browser XY or Z, and/or any one of dozens of other applications that allow malware attacks. Why are you now beating them up for trying to solve the problem?
This is another example of Windows being designed to be defective. Other OSs have recognised this problem and solved it long ago. Microsoft is just too big, slow and arrogant to fix obvious and important problems instead of wasting immense time, effort and money of a dreadful cosmetic makeover of their UI.
Your friends working on the actual AI problem over here in Linguistics and Psychology find it awfully amusing that you're trying to program a concept before we even know what that concept is.
Sometimes insights come from theoreticians, sometimes experimenters. C'est la vie.
Do you imagine that the human brain behaves much differently during death than rat brains?
I think it might, depending on how much our self-consciousness contributes to the interpretation of the sensations.
I came close to bleeding to death once when I was living in a remote site. After a motorbike accident, I was in the back seat of a car being driven cross-country towards a hospital a few hours away, and gradually lost enough blood to pass out. I was revived with a blood transfusion in an ambulance that had driven out to the main road to meet us, but would have died without waking if they hadn't got there in time.
I mostly remember being very very cold and asking for blankets, despite it being a 35c day. My vision faded in and out, not by getting dark but by losing contrast. Even when I could see clearly, my mind would drift and not grasp anything I was seeing. There was whiteness, like light, but washed out from fading colour, not a bright source, Sound faded in and out in a similar way, and I strongly remember a woman sobbing, but little else, though the friends who were in the car tell me they were talking to me, and I sometimes responded.
Apart from the cold, and a sense of sadness that might have come from my crying friend, it was not at all distressing. Quite tranquil in fact, but for me, it was not mystical at all. I have no belief in gods or afterlifes, but I imagine someone from a religious background would have interpreted the physical experiences very differently.
.
And since almost 100% of their funding comes from Google anyway, I can't help but thinking this is a joint project, or at least carried out with Google's full approval.
About 85%, and that's from a standard commercial arrangement - eg a fee for a service. It bought Google the default search engine spot, but nothing else.
Microsoft had the opportunity to buy the spot for Bing, but chose not to.
Because virtual keyboards on touch screens outright suck to a degree even higher than really bad laptop keyboards.
Maybe half a decade ago, but slide-style keyboards like Swype and Google Keyboard are almost as fast as physical keys. And if you're using them to add field work to office documents, which is a core use-case for a lot of handheld devices in businesses, they win hands-down.
Yea everyone knows a Nexus 7 beats a core i5! AMIRITE?
It does if your goals are to have a handheld tablet which runs cool, has great battery life, plenty of touch-optimised apps and low OS maintenance requirements.
And that's the problem with both the Surfaces.
The RT is late to the party with several irritations and nothing better to offer than the other tablet OSs, not to mention a lot less apps available. The Pro brings the same old Windows benefits, complexity and issues every other Windows machine brings, but also puts nothing new on the table. Technically there's lots of click-click cleverness and interface bling, but neither enables users to do anything new or better than what's already available.
Microsoft has been trying to do tablets for longer than most companies - I even still have a Compaq Concerto with Pen Windows on it - but they've never managed to give the actual users of the hardware any tangible benefit for the cost or complexity. For users, it's not so much "Where do you want to go today?" as a bewildered "Well, what can I do with this thing now?"
Yeah, Icebike is a MS promoter from a long way back.
I prefer the Australian Financial Review's version:
Microsoft slashes Surface prices (for unlucky few)
Microsoft has slashed the price of its ill-starred Surface Pro tablet in countries around the world. But, in a lucky escape, the discounts don’t apply here in Australia.
Prices for the Surface Pro tumbled in the US, Canada, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan over the weekend. In the US, it’s now listed as “Starting at $799”, $US100 cheaper than it was a few days ago.
Meanwhile here in Australia, the Surface Pro still starts at $999, just like always. Fingers crossed the discounting doesn’t spread down here, otherwise people might be tempted to buy one, which wouldn’t be a good idea. Not just yet, anyway.
I've decided to keep my old car until I can replace it with an electric vehicle.
This has almost everything I need, range is great - my daily drive is 30km, so it'll be fine for that and a fair bit more. Performance looks excellent for the type of vehicle and while I'm not a BMW fan, I expect it'll be reasonably well constructed. If the price is really 40k, it'll be high, but acceptable given the lower running costs, though I expect by the time it lands in Australia, it'll be double or triple the price in rest of the world...
But then as you say, its looks are...special.
From the side, you'd think the designer had his/her elbow jolted while they were sketching the doorline, and the corresponding rear roofline dip is likewise utterly horrible. It has that kitschy little wedge just behind the front wheels to make sure it looks dated and busy instead of clean and efficient. And that wedge-shaped black fillet from the underbody to make it look like it's braking hard while standing still. Why?
The front isn't totally despicable, though the twee fake blanked off radiator intakes should have been binned and the person suggesting them slapped on the head with a (steel) tyre iron. It's ELECTRIC, you idiots. Not keen on the contrast colour sideburn headlight droopy bits either, but I could live with them.
The back looks bulky, saggy and committee-designed, not nice, but not appalling either, while the interior is generic enough to be ok, provided you can option out the baby-poo mustard yellow and soviet-bloc concrete grey contrast trim.
I mean, I want an electric car that does what this one does. But I sure as hell don't want this one. Mercedes? Volkswagen? Opel? Ford? Are you listening?
No one but Samsung is making any real money selling Android phones.
Only on Slashdot. In the real world, that's just old FUD, and the market is competitive amd dynamic.
Apple versus Samsung passe': Smartphone rivals like LG, Sony gain on leaders
Samsung is now more profitable than Apple, according to second-quarter financial results released by Samsung on Friday in Seoul, South Korea. But while the two rivals have successively one-upped each other with ever sleeker, more technologically sophisticated phones, new competition is stirring.
The combined share of the worldwide smartphone market controlled by Apple and Samsung slipped to 43 per cent in the second quarter from 49 per cent a year earlier, IDC, a research firm, reported Friday.
Some of the companies chipping away at the leaders are familiar names trying comebacks, like Sony, Nokia and HTC. Others are relative newcomers, like LG of South Korea and Lenovo, ZTE and Huawei of China.
The problem is that Apache is more of a BSD license and Libre is GPL, no point in starting up THAT old flamewar so lets just say they agree to disagree and move on.
Actually, they agree to cooperate and move on.
3."Do you share code with Libre? sub question A: If so, will you soon both be even more similar -- in effect unforked? Sub question B: If you are not using each other's code, why not?"
We cooperate and coordinate and share with LibreOffice, as well as other open source and even proprietary application vendors, in several ways
Our American guest understood something very different by thongs and was having second thoughts about whether this trip was something he wanted to participate in if that's what the guys were going to be wearing
The correct term is "budgie smugglers".
N.B. If you want to be disgusted, Google "Tony Abbott".*
* Not because of his predilection for wearing budgie smugglers, just because he's a poor excuse for a politician and even less for a human being..
Or just maybe this "Google Now" might be an app you can run when you want to be able to interact with your phone hands-free, and leave off when you don't?
Ok, I get the outrage now that we all know just how pervasive the TLA spying really is, but the ability to listen in using cell phone microphones is nothing new. It's been part of the surveillance landscape for decades, well before smartphones were common.
Schneier on Security, 2006:
The surveillance technique came to light in an opinion published this week by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan. He ruled that the "roving bug" was legal because federal wiretapping law is broad enough to permit eavesdropping even of conversations that take place near a suspect's cell phone. Kaplan's opinion said that the eavesdropping technique "functioned whether the phone was powered on or off." Some handsets can't be fully powered down without removing the battery; for instance, some Nokia models will wake up when turned off if an alarm is set.
So fine, your phone can listen to you, just like it always could. If you don't want that, then you don't want a mobile phone, but that's nothing to do with a (possibly) handy voice activation app.
Even if it's available to the merely curious, at least it helps demystify some of the most ubiquitous tools of our time. Children should be encouraged to know what's happening behind the scenes as well as how to use their apps.
Kids don't magically morph into CS students overnight.
Actually, Linux is versatile enough that it can look like anything.
My MythTV HTPC looks like a television, with an interface that works well on a remote. I have a netbook with Peppermint on it that looks sort of MacOSish, and a desktop running Debian Gnome 3 that looks like itself. My main laptop has both Unity and KDE installed, and I switch between them depending on tasks (KDE for business apps, Unity for artworks). Another laptop has the latest Mint install, and while that has a similar workflow to Win7, it looks completely different.
When you throw some of the touchscreen interfaces into the mix, you get completely different workflows and looks. In fact, I'd say most of the recent innovation in both desktop and mobile UIs has happened on Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
The first thing you should have asked is: What kind of radiation from what type of source?
"While it had been treated to reduce radioactive caesium, tests of the leaked water found it was still highly contaminated with beta-ray emitting substances including strontium, which has a half-life of about 30 years and can cause bone cancers."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-20/toxic-puddles-discovered-at-fukushima-nuclear-plant/4899844
Enjoy your fish and osteosarcomas.
Uhhh isn't that the argument that EVERYBODY uses to stick their shit in startup and slow Windows to a crawl, that THEIR shit is important and lightweight
And they're all absolutely right.
Now more than ever, it IS important to keep BOTH applications and OS updated. You Windows promoters are all very quick to leap to their defence and claim it's Flash, Acrobat, Java, Browser XY or Z, and/or any one of dozens of other applications that allow malware attacks. Why are you now beating them up for trying to solve the problem?
This is another example of Windows being designed to be defective. Other OSs have recognised this problem and solved it long ago. Microsoft is just too big, slow and arrogant to fix obvious and important problems instead of wasting immense time, effort and money of a dreadful cosmetic makeover of their UI.
Your friends working on the actual AI problem over here in Linguistics and Psychology find it awfully amusing that you're trying to program a concept before we even know what that concept is.
Sometimes insights come from theoreticians, sometimes experimenters. C'est la vie.
After all, the Three Wolf Uranus Shirt was a flop.
And the Pluto version was an absolute howler...
Do you imagine that the human brain behaves much differently during death than rat brains?
I think it might, depending on how much our self-consciousness contributes to the interpretation of the sensations.
I came close to bleeding to death once when I was living in a remote site. After a motorbike accident, I was in the back seat of a car being driven cross-country towards a hospital a few hours away, and gradually lost enough blood to pass out. I was revived with a blood transfusion in an ambulance that had driven out to the main road to meet us, but would have died without waking if they hadn't got there in time.
I mostly remember being very very cold and asking for blankets, despite it being a 35c day. My vision faded in and out, not by getting dark but by losing contrast. Even when I could see clearly, my mind would drift and not grasp anything I was seeing. There was whiteness, like light, but washed out from fading colour, not a bright source, Sound faded in and out in a similar way, and I strongly remember a woman sobbing, but little else, though the friends who were in the car tell me they were talking to me, and I sometimes responded.
Apart from the cold, and a sense of sadness that might have come from my crying friend, it was not at all distressing. Quite tranquil in fact, but for me, it was not mystical at all. I have no belief in gods or afterlifes, but I imagine someone from a religious background would have interpreted the physical experiences very differently. .
And since almost 100% of their funding comes from Google anyway, I can't help but thinking this is a joint project, or at least carried out with Google's full approval.
About 85%, and that's from a standard commercial arrangement - eg a fee for a service. It bought Google the default search engine spot, but nothing else.
Microsoft had the opportunity to buy the spot for Bing, but chose not to.
http://www.businessinsider.com/why-did-microsoft-let-google-win-the-firefox-deal-2011-12
Because virtual keyboards on touch screens outright suck to a degree even higher than really bad laptop keyboards.
Maybe half a decade ago, but slide-style keyboards like Swype and Google Keyboard are almost as fast as physical keys. And if you're using them to add field work to office documents, which is a core use-case for a lot of handheld devices in businesses, they win hands-down.
You must be using some new branch of mathematics that I wasn't previously aware of.
Or Excel for Android.
Yea everyone knows a Nexus 7 beats a core i5! AMIRITE?
It does if your goals are to have a handheld tablet which runs cool, has great battery life, plenty of touch-optimised apps and low OS maintenance requirements.
And that's the problem with both the Surfaces.
The RT is late to the party with several irritations and nothing better to offer than the other tablet OSs, not to mention a lot less apps available. The Pro brings the same old Windows benefits, complexity and issues every other Windows machine brings, but also puts nothing new on the table. Technically there's lots of click-click cleverness and interface bling, but neither enables users to do anything new or better than what's already available.
Microsoft has been trying to do tablets for longer than most companies - I even still have a Compaq Concerto with Pen Windows on it - but they've never managed to give the actual users of the hardware any tangible benefit for the cost or complexity. For users, it's not so much "Where do you want to go today?" as a bewildered "Well, what can I do with this thing now?"
Bahahahahahaaha
Yeah, Icebike is a MS promoter from a long way back.
I prefer the Australian Financial Review's version:
Microsoft slashes Surface prices (for unlucky few)
Microsoft has slashed the price of its ill-starred Surface Pro tablet in countries around the world. But, in a lucky escape, the discounts don’t apply here in Australia.
Prices for the Surface Pro tumbled in the US, Canada, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan over the weekend. In the US, it’s now listed as “Starting at $799”, $US100 cheaper than it was a few days ago.
Meanwhile here in Australia, the Surface Pro still starts at $999, just like always. Fingers crossed the discounting doesn’t spread down here, otherwise people might be tempted to buy one, which wouldn’t be a good idea. Not just yet, anyway.
http://www.afr.com/f/free/technology/digitallife/microsoft_slashes_surface_prices_MjgML0oVz8scIMOLdJ78LL
And about as common...
worst of all... ugly as sin.
I've decided to keep my old car until I can replace it with an electric vehicle.
This has almost everything I need, range is great - my daily drive is 30km, so it'll be fine for that and a fair bit more. Performance looks excellent for the type of vehicle and while I'm not a BMW fan, I expect it'll be reasonably well constructed. If the price is really 40k, it'll be high, but acceptable given the lower running costs, though I expect by the time it lands in Australia, it'll be double or triple the price in rest of the world...
But then as you say, its looks are ...special.
From the side, you'd think the designer had his/her elbow jolted while they were sketching the doorline, and the corresponding rear roofline dip is likewise utterly horrible. It has that kitschy little wedge just behind the front wheels to make sure it looks dated and busy instead of clean and efficient. And that wedge-shaped black fillet from the underbody to make it look like it's braking hard while standing still. Why?
The front isn't totally despicable, though the twee fake blanked off radiator intakes should have been binned and the person suggesting them slapped on the head with a (steel) tyre iron. It's ELECTRIC, you idiots. Not keen on the contrast colour sideburn headlight droopy bits either, but I could live with them.
The back looks bulky, saggy and committee-designed, not nice, but not appalling either, while the interior is generic enough to be ok, provided you can option out the baby-poo mustard yellow and soviet-bloc concrete grey contrast trim.
I mean, I want an electric car that does what this one does. But I sure as hell don't want this one. Mercedes? Volkswagen? Opel? Ford? Are you listening?
No one but Samsung is making any real money selling Android phones.
Only on Slashdot. In the real world, that's just old FUD, and the market is competitive amd dynamic.
Apple versus Samsung passe': Smartphone rivals like LG, Sony gain on leaders
Samsung is now more profitable than Apple, according to second-quarter financial results released by Samsung on Friday in Seoul, South Korea. But while the two rivals have successively one-upped each other with ever sleeker, more technologically sophisticated phones, new competition is stirring.
The combined share of the worldwide smartphone market controlled by Apple and Samsung slipped to 43 per cent in the second quarter from 49 per cent a year earlier, IDC, a research firm, reported Friday.
Some of the companies chipping away at the leaders are familiar names trying comebacks, like Sony, Nokia and HTC. Others are relative newcomers, like LG of South Korea and Lenovo, ZTE and Huawei of China.
http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-07-27/news/40833643_1_samsung-electronics-smartphone-market-strategy-analytics
a human will be aware enough to never jab the needle all the way through your arm. If there's a bug, the computer will do that happily and quickly.
And a bit of thought to the mechanical design of the robot will prevent it ever having the physical capability to do that.
Which oddly enough, is how they've designed the robot in TFA....
I'm just trying to imagine buying one of these for my parents.
Then imagine waiting a few weeks for some more enterprsing people to develop the apps to do it for them.
This is a platform, not an appliance.
It's always been the monopolists who've refused to interoperate. They want to lock people to their systems.
MS/Apple style lockin is what's to be feared, not good healthy competition.
The problem is that Apache is more of a BSD license and Libre is GPL, no point in starting up THAT old flamewar so lets just say they agree to disagree and move on.
Actually, they agree to cooperate and move on.
3."Do you share code with Libre? sub question A: If so, will you soon both be even more similar -- in effect unforked? Sub question B: If you are not using each other's code, why not?"
We cooperate and coordinate and share with LibreOffice, as well as other open source and even proprietary application vendors, in several ways
https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/entry/your_top_questions_answered
That's the great benefit of FOSS projects. Their goals don't include locking users or developers down.
Our American guest understood something very different by thongs and was having second thoughts about whether this trip was something he wanted to participate in if that's what the guys were going to be wearing
The correct term is "budgie smugglers".
N.B. If you want to be disgusted, Google "Tony Abbott".*
* Not because of his predilection for wearing budgie smugglers, just because he's a poor excuse for a politician and even less for a human being..
pstotext [file] | less
Or just maybe this "Google Now" might be an app you can run when you want to be able to interact with your phone hands-free, and leave off when you don't?
Ok, I get the outrage now that we all know just how pervasive the TLA spying really is, but the ability to listen in using cell phone microphones is nothing new. It's been part of the surveillance landscape for decades, well before smartphones were common.
Schneier on Security, 2006:
The surveillance technique came to light in an opinion published this week by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan. He ruled that the "roving bug" was legal because federal wiretapping law is broad enough to permit eavesdropping even of conversations that take place near a suspect's cell phone.
Kaplan's opinion said that the eavesdropping technique "functioned whether the phone was powered on or off." Some handsets can't be fully powered down without removing the battery; for instance, some Nokia models will wake up when turned off if an alarm is set.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/12/remotely_eavesd_1.html
So fine, your phone can listen to you, just like it always could. If you don't want that, then you don't want a mobile phone, but that's nothing to do with a (possibly) handy voice activation app.
No. It only makes sense if you're hawking proprietary software and want to hide how it works.
Who cares?
Even if it's available to the merely curious, at least it helps demystify some of the most ubiquitous tools of our time. Children should be encouraged to know what's happening behind the scenes as well as how to use their apps.
Kids don't magically morph into CS students overnight.
Maybe, but a lot of the people I've set up with Linux have stayed with it. I suspect the barrier is at OEM level, not with consumers.
They're actually trying to emulate OSX though.
Actually, Linux is versatile enough that it can look like anything.
My MythTV HTPC looks like a television, with an interface that works well on a remote. I have a netbook with Peppermint on it that looks sort of MacOSish, and a desktop running Debian Gnome 3 that looks like itself. My main laptop has both Unity and KDE installed, and I switch between them depending on tasks (KDE for business apps, Unity for artworks). Another laptop has the latest Mint install, and while that has a similar workflow to Win7, it looks completely different.
When you throw some of the touchscreen interfaces into the mix, you get completely different workflows and looks. In fact, I'd say most of the recent innovation in both desktop and mobile UIs has happened on Linux.